ADRIAN — A program of seasonal music — including some new twists on old favorites — performed with the Chicago-based Axiom Brass Quintet is on tap for the Adrian Symphony Orchestra’s annual holiday concert.

The performance, titled “Festive Brass,” is at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 15, at Adrian College’s Dawson Auditorium. Tickets are $25 and $22 for adults, $23 and $20 for senior citizens, and $13 and $10 for students, and are available by calling 264-3121, at www.adriansymphony.org or at the door beginning at 6 p.m.

The Axiom Brass Quintet is made up of trumpeter Dorival Puccini Jr., tuba player Kevin Harrison, trumpet player Colin Oldberg, trombonist Caleb Lambert and — subbing in for this concert — horn player Joel Benway.

Puccini, who is currently on the faculty of Lake Forest College, is a founding member of Axiom Brass. A native of Brazil, he has performed with orchestras and ensembles around Brazil and the U.S.

Harrison is the principal tuba player for the Northwest Indiana Symphony. He is also on the faculty at the Wheaton College Conservatory and has performed throughout the Midwest, including with the St. Louis and Kansas City symphonies, as well as with the Estonian National Symphony.

Oldberg has performed with groups including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, with such conductors as Riccardo Muti, Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez. In 2009, he was selected to perform in the first ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas.

Lambert, winner of the 2012 Chicago Brass Festival solo competition, has performed with the Chicago Symphony, the South Bend Symphony, the Symphony of Oak Park River Forrest and the Chicago Composer’s Orchestra, among other ensembles.

Benway teaches horn at Elmhurst College and has performed with groups such as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Chicago Philharmonic and the Elgin Symphony.

Puccini started his ensemble while he was a student at the Juilliard School of Music and performing as part of a program that gave students scholarships in return for playing at community venues including hospitals and retirement homes.

“It was a powerful experience for me, to see the power that music had for people,” he said.

After school, the musicians with whom he’d been performing decided to stick together and play professionally. Over time, however, the original members dropped out, leaving Puccini as the only one who’d been there from the start. But the group was based in Chicago, an area “blessed with great brass players,” and so as members have left, other top-notch players have been there to take over.

Page 2 of 3 - “We’re so blessed to have a group that’s extremely functional,” he said, “and we have a blast traveling together.”

Those things are as key to having a good chamber-music ensemble as is the skill level of the players, Puccini said. “If people don’t get along, the music is affected as well. Chamber music is an intimate conversation between friends,” people who may have very different personalities but who can talk together, musically, onstage.

Harrison agreed with Puccini’s analogy.

“A successful chamber group has to have people that are flexible and open-minded and get along,” he said. “It’s always difficult to find that balance, to be a good musician but also a good traveling companion.”

Most recently, Axiom Brass spent time in Germany and then in the Dominican Republic, where the quintet worked with the Adrian Symphony’s music director, John Thomas Dodson, and with some of the country’s budding young musicians — part and parcel of a music-education outreach mission that the ensemble takes very seriously.

“It was so wonderful to see those kids (in the Dominican Republic) light up,” said Harrison.

Saturday’s concert features the brass ensemble, the orchestra, or both groups together in a variety of holiday music, ranging from traditional Christmas tunes such as “Joy to the World” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” to a Hanukkah medley to Dodson’s arrangements of a medley of carols and of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Also on the program are two works whose titles and arrangements are clever twists on the originals: “Wassail, Wassail All Over the Tuba” and “Deck the Horn.”

Where those last two pieces are concerned, the former, as its name implies, features Harrison and his tuba. “It’s a piece for tuba and orchestra, which is very, very rare,” he said. “It sounds like something in a city-band concert, but with tuba instead of cornet.”

For the work, arranger James Stephenson, who works extensively with the Axiom Brass, incorporated a number of different musical genres, said Harrison, “and it’s a lot of fun.”

As for “Deck the Horn,” “it’s ‘Deck the Halls’ as a Renaissance dance, with the horn as the solo,” Puccini said. It utilizes both the orchestra and a tuba-less version of the brass ensemble, “to give Kevin a break,” he added, laughing, after the earlier tuba-heavy work.

Puccini described the pieces the ensemble will perform Saturday evening as “recompositions,” rather than “rearrangements.”

Page 3 of 3 - “You’ll hear the familiar tunes,” he said, “but they are incredibly well-done by Jim Stephenson.”

If you go

WHAT: “Festive Brass,” with the Axiom Brass Quintet and the Adrian Symphony Orchestra

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 15

WHERE: Dawson Auditorium, Adrian College

TICKETS: $25 and $22 for adults, $23 and $20 for senior citizens, $13 and $10 for students